In the Koru Club at Auckland International and there are finally broadband connections available. I last flew about 2 months ago so it must be quite recent. I have been cursing this place for years as being the only airport in the world that I have been to that doesn’t have broadband readily available.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or Search Engine Advertising. Bill is in favour of SEA and I think this is the right idea. Traditional SEO tactics will become progressively less relevant. Google and others don’t want you to do SEO and they have billions of dollars to try and ignore all the little tricks and scams. Build your site from the ground up so that your content can be indexed and then put your money into search engine advertising.

Technorati Tags: SEA, SEO

There’s a Hoffmail for every occasion.

Technorati Tags: Auckland power cut, hoffmail

These guys take their MP3’s very seriously indeed. Defective by Design is an organisation that is very upset about the digital rights management (DRM) built into MP3’s downloaded from the Apple iTunes store. The DRM technology makes it almost impossible to take your MP3’s with you should you choose to switch from an iPod to a competing device. They have organised a number of demonstrations at Apple stores across the US this weekend. Take a look at the photos from the demonstrations and the images they use on their picket signs.

This is an interesting position for the normally much loved Apple brand. I don’t think their DRM is any different from those used in Windows Media Player formats, although I guess they have a wider range of supported devices, whereas really with iTunes you need an iPod. The other question of course, is why would you ever want to move away from the iPod?

Technorati Tags: apple, defective by design, drm, reputation, RIAA

Watching real time broadcast TV on your mobile phone is now a reality in Italy where you can watch the Soccer World Cup on supported devices this month. Vodafone Ireland and Sky TV have also announced that they will soon release a package of Sky channels that will be available to Vodafone customers. Will be interesting to see what consumers react to this.

Technorati Tags: 3G, mobile tv, vodafone

Boot Camp allows Intel-based Mac users to install Windows XP and have a dual-boot OS machine. Parallels have developed an application that will allow you to run Windows inside OS X. This looks very good, and it is very cheap (US$39.99). I look forward to trying this out when I get my new MacBook Pro.

Rick Benavidez (aka edgecloud) is certainly happy with MacBook Pro and Parallels by the looks of his post. I agree that for developers it is the perfect package for development and testing.

Technorati Tags: apple, boot camp, parallels

You know those online forms that ask you to fill in a random string of characters from a generated image so they can be sure that a human is submitting the form? Check out what Stuart got from this site when he was doing a whois lookup yesterday. I swear this is the real deal, not a Photoshop job.

Check out Microsoft’s answer to Google’s personalised home. Start.com. Looks pretty familiar if you have been using the Google one. I have to say I like the look of it in terms of design and the ability to change the colour scheme is good. Try the search feature, results presented in a layer on top of the home page. Good use of AJAX.

Technorati Tags: ajax

Web based applications have many advantages over traditional desktop or client/server software. You only need a web browser so there is no additional software to install and so they are easy to support and make available over the internal network and Internet. As a result, many businesses of all sizes have used web based applications both for interacting with customer (e.g. online banking, online ordering) as well as for internal use (e.g. intranets).

The problem with a web application is the nature of its simplicity. When you click on a link or submit a form, that request must be sent from your computer to the web server, where it is processed and then an entirely new web page is sent back to your computer for downloading and rendering by the browser. Your browser cache, network proxy server and speed of your Internet connection can all make this faster, but the nature of this one-way stop-start process inevitably creates a slower experience for the user than using a desktop application such as Excel or Outlook. You have to stop working and wait for the browser to download the new page. In a basic website or an application that is not used frequently this has not been a major issue, however, if you are using the web application repeatedly this can get frustrating and affect productivity.

Solutions to this have traditionally been plug-ins using technologies like Active X or Java, however, this requires installing new software and has issues with security, and operating system/browser compatibility, for example, Active-X plug-ins will only run in Internet Explorer on Windows.

The answer to the web’s sluggishness is AJAX, which is short for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML. AJAX is not a new technology as such, it is an approach to web application development that uses a number of existing mature technologies including JavaScript and XML to create a richer, faster user experience by minimising the number of ‘round trips’ your web browser has to make back to the web server.

The best way to explain how this is different from your usual experience of the web is by using some examples from Google. All of their new applications made heavy use of Ajax and demonstrate how powerful it is.

Google Suggest will anticipate what you are searching for and suggest phrases you might want to use as you type. This is familiar functionality to many desktop applications but until now, it has been very difficult to achieve this on the web.

Gmail, Google’s web based mail service, also uses Ajax to suggest email addresses as you type in the recipient for your message. Again, this is a feature many of us use in Outlook every day but is less common in web mail.

Google Maps is even more impressive, allowing you to zoom and scroll around a map or satellite image without refreshing the page.

Getting technical for a moment, Javascript is using XMLHttpRequest to send XML data back and forth to the webserver without the need to reload the page. The link I reference at the end of the article provides a more detailed technical explanation for those that require it.

What makes AJAX so compelling is:

• It is not something you buy or download, you use standard technologies that already exist.
• It is platform independent - Java, .NET, PHP, it does not matter, all of these can use Ajax.
• The browser only requires JavaScript so it will work across different operating systems and browsers without the need to install plug-ins.
• Applications do not need to be completely redeveloped, just use AJAX to enhance functionality where it will add value.
• Google and other early adopters have already done the hard work of demonstrating the commercial viability.

Using this approach will provide a richer experience for users. Depending on the actual application, this can lead to increased productivity, happier customers, or more online orders. Those that choose to ignore AJAX or are slow to adopt are in danger of being left behind as users come to expect more interactive functionality as standard.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to find out more about our experience with AJAX.

References:
Ajax – A New Approach to Web Applications by Jesse James Garrett
- An excellent summary of Ajax from one of the early adopters of the technology.

Technorati Tags: ajax

The music industry is struggling to shut down Russian MP3 store AllOfMP3.com. This site is now second only to iTunes in the UK market in terms of popularity. The range of music they have is very impressive and the site is very good looking and easy to use. So how can they charge only $0.30 - $0.40 per song? Easy, they don’t pay the record labels or artists a cent so it is still incredibly profitable. It is therefore illegal to use this site in most countries, but it isn’t currently illegal in Russia, where the company is based, despite the best efforts of the US to put pressure on the Russian government. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Technorati Tags: allofmp3, RIAA